Homeward Bound (63 page)

She went right on speaking English: “It’s because you say this kind of thing that some people thought you might be more comfortable staying here than coming back to the United States.”

“‘Some people.’ ” Sam echoed that with an odd, sour relish. “I know what kind of people, too—the kind who think anybody who doesn’t believe all the same things they do isn’t a real American. Well, I happen to think I am, whether they like it or not.”

Major Nichols didn’t answer that right away. She studied Yeager instead. He had no idea what was going on behind her eyes. Whatever she thought, she kept to herself. He wouldn’t have wanted to play poker against her; she would have taken the shirt off his back. At last, she said, “You’re not what my briefings made me think you were going to be.”

“No horns,” he said. “No tail. No fangs, that’s for sure—I’ve only got four of my own choppers. Lost the rest more than a hundred years ago, if you add cold sleep into it.”

“They can do something about that now. They have what they call dental implants,” she told him. “They go into your jawbone, and they’re just about as good as real teeth.”

“To tell you the truth, I hardly remember what real teeth are like,” Sam said. “I’ve gone without ’em since I was a kid.” Human teeth amazed and horrified the Lizards. They couldn’t imagine why evolution made people go through life with only two sets. Like small-l lizards on earth, they replaced theirs continuously throughout their lives. And then Sam smiled sourly at the major from the
Commodore Perry.
“Besides, what difference does it make? You just said you’re not going to let me go back to Earth anyway, didn’t you?”

She flushed. Her skin wasn’t dark enough to hide it. In a small voice, she said, “Me and my big mouth.”

“You and your big mouth,” he agreed. “Look, tell me something I want to know for a change, will you? How are my grandchildren? Do I have great-grandchildren yet? Great-great? And how are Mickey and Donald getting along?”

“One of your grandsons—Richard—is at Stanford University, heading the Interspecies Studies Department there,” Major Nichols said. “The other—Bruce—runs a company that arranges cultural exchanges with the Lizards. They’re both well, or they were when we left. You have five great-grandchildren—three boys and two girls—all told, and two great-great-granddaughters. Bruce is divorced. Richard had a brief failed marriage, then remarried and has stayed that way for almost thirty years.”

“Lord!” Sam said softly. Jonathan’s boys had been kids when he went into cold sleep. They’d been in college when Jonathan and Karen went on ice. It sounded as if they’d done pretty well for themselves since. By the way their bodies felt, they’d be older than their parents. If that wasn’t bizarre, Sam didn’t know what would be. “And what about Mickey and Donald?”

“Mickey is working with your grandson, Bruce,” the major said. “He recently published his autobiography. He called it
Between Two Worlds.
He wrote it in English. It did well in the United States, and even better in translation with the Lizards. The translation is probably on its way here now at speed-of-light. There’s talk of movie versions from Hollywood and from the Race.”

“Wow!” Sam said. “That’s not half bad—better than I expected, to tell you the truth, since he had two strikes against him the minute he hatched. What about Donald? You didn’t say anything about him. Is he all right? If it’s bad news, for God’s sake spit it out. Don’t try to sugarcoat it.”

“Donald . . .” Nicole Nichols hesitated again. Again, Sam had trouble reading her face. Was that amusement sparking somewhere deep in her eyes? He thought so, but he couldn’t be sure. She said, “The past five years, Donald has hosted something called
You’d Better Believe It.
It’s the highest-rated game show in the USA and Canada. I wouldn’t want to say whether it’s the best—my tastes don’t really run in that direction—but it has to be the most spectacular. And Donald, without a doubt, is the most spectacular thing in it.”

Sam stared. Then he started to laugh. Then he started to howl. Donald had always been the more outgoing little Lizard. Now he wasn’t a
little
Lizard any more. And he was evidently more outgoing than Sam had ever imagined.

“I’ll be a son of a gun,” he said; he still felt funny about swearing in front of a woman, even if she was a major, too. “Should I want to shake his hand or horsewhip him?”

“That’s not for me to say,” Major Nichols answered. “We ought to have a disk with some of the shows on it aboard the ship. They knew you and your son and daughter-in-law would want to see it.”

“Well, good,” Sam said. “That’s something, anyhow. Once I see the shows, I wouldn’t mind going back and telling him what I think of them. My grandsons and Mickey probably have a lot to teach me, too.”

Major Nichols’ face froze back into a perfect, unreadable mask. She’d acted amazingly lifelike there for a little while, when she was talking about Sam’s family by blood and adoption. No more. She said, “As I told you, sir, that isn’t in our present plans. I’m sorry.”

I’ll bet,
Sam thought. “Once upon a time, I read a story called ‘The Man without a Country,’ ” he said. “Darn good story. Seems as if I’m in that boat now, except the fellow in the story didn’t want his country but it looks like my country doesn’t want me.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicole Nichols said again: a polite, meaningless phrase. “In fact, the United States is grateful for everything you and the rest of the crew of the
Admiral Peary
have done here on Home.”

“Just not grateful enough to want me back.” Sam didn’t bother trying to hide his bitterness.

“Circumstances are not just what we thought they’d be when we got our orders,” she said. “Maybe the commandant will see that as justification for changing them. I must tell you, though, I doubt it. And I certainly don’t have the authority to do so. If you will excuse me, sir . . .” She left his room before he could say whether he excused her or not. He stared around the place. Live here, or somewhere much like here, for the rest of his life? Live here while other humans zipped back and forth between the stars? Had any man ever had a crueler prison?

Karen Yeager slid the
skelkwank
disk into the player. Disk and player had been manufactured more than ten light-years apart by two different species, but the one fit perfectly into the other. Humans had borrowed the Lizards’ standards along with their technology. A lot of what they made was interchangeable with what they’d taken from the Race.

“This ought to be fun,” Jonathan said.

“This ought to be terrible,” Sam Yeager said. “A game-show host? My God, why didn’t Donald just go out and start robbing banks?”

“I’ll tell you what I want to see,” Karen said. “I want to see what the clothes and the hairstyles look like. We’ve been out of touch for a long time.”

“We’ll be a bunch of frumps when we do get home,” Melanie Blanchard said. Then she shrugged. “We would have been even worse frumps if we’d gone back in cold sleep.”

All the Americans from the
Admiral Peary
crowded into Karen and Jonathan’s room to watch the disk of
You’d Better Believe It.
The ice cubes Karen was so proud of were chilling a lot of Lizard-style vodka. Frank Coffey said, “At least we got here, by God. We were awake and doing our jobs when the
Commodore Perry
came in. There are bound to be ships behind us full of people in cold sleep. What they’ll think when they wake up . . .” He shook his head.

“Little bit of a surprise,” Sam Yeager said. He seemed subdued. He was drinking more than Karen would have expected, too.
Or am I just imagining things?
she wondered. She didn’t want to ask if anything was wrong, not there in front of everybody. Her father-in-law had almost as strong a sense of privacy as a cat.

Instead, Karen said, “Shall I fire it up?”

“Yeah, do it.” Tom de la Rosa raised his glass in salute. “Let’s see what we came all these light-years to escape.” Everybody laughed.

“Play,” Karen said in the Race’s language. That was one difference between local machines and those back on Earth: these didn’t understand English. They didn’t always understand a human accent, either. This time, though, the disk started spinning.

Music swelled. It sounded raucous and tinny to Karen, but what she listened to would have sounded the same to her grandparents. The computer graphics for the opening credits were at least as smooth and at least as fancy as anything the Lizards used. Sam Yeager looked impressed. That hadn’t happened when he went into cold sleep in 1977. By the time Karen did, seventeen years later, people had pretty much caught up.

“And now,” the announcer said in the slightly greasy tones of announcers everywhere and everywhen, “here are the lovely Rita and Donald and . . .
You’d Better Believe It
!”

The audience applauded frantically. The lovely Rita strutted out onto the stage. She
was
lovely: a statuesque brunette with a profile to die for. Karen, though, didn’t think her husband or any of the other American males in the audience was paying attention to Rita’s profile. The sparkling gown she wore trailed behind her on the floor . . . but was cut Minoan-style on top.

“Holy Jesus!” Tom said. “How‘d you like to put makeup
there
?”

“I’d like it fine,” Frank Coffey said. The guys bayed goatish laughter. Karen wanted to kick Jonathan. He hadn’t said a word, but he was paying
close
attention to the screen.

When the camera went to the studio audience for a moment, Karen saw about half the younger women were topless. Some of them wore Lizard-style body paint, some didn’t. That had been coming in Karen’s time, but it hadn’t got there yet. Plainly, it had now.

Back to Rita. She flashed a million-watt smile. “Now, folks,” she said, “heeeeere’s . . . Donald!”

He bounded out to center stage. The audience went nuts. All the Americans in the room in Sitneff started howling with glee. Donald was wearing a tuxedo—a painted-on tuxedo, perfect right down to the red-carnation boutonniere. Even his hands had been painted to make them seem a Caucasian‘s—though not a whole lot of Caucasians had fingerclaws.

“Hello, people!” he said. Energy came off him in waves. “Welcome to another session of—”

“
You’d Better Believe It!
” the audience shouted. They applauded themselves.

“That’s right.” Donald couldn’t grin—his mouth wasn’t made for it. But he gave the impression that he was grinning. He was a performer right down to the tip of his tailstump. “Now we’re going to find out how much tonight’s contestants don’t know—and how much they’ll pay for it.” It was a throwaway line. The studio audience broke up anyway. Karen felt herself smiling, too. She couldn’t help it. Donald pulled a smile out of her the way a magician pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

She looked around the room. She wasn’t the only one smiling. Donald had even managed to distract the men from the lovely Rita. If that didn’t prove he had what it took, nothing ever would.

Out came the first contestant, a short, dumpy, gray-haired woman from Great Falls, Montana. Donald contrived to grin at her, too. “Hello, Mrs. Donahue,” he said. “What’s your excuse for being here with us tonight? Exhibitionism? Or just greed?”

Mrs. Donahue blushed. “A little of both, maybe,” she said.

“
You’d better believe it!
” the audience roared. She had to know that was coming, but she flinched anyway.

“Well, here we go,” Donald said. “Why don’t you climb into the hot seat, and we’ll give you a whirl.”

The hot seat had a seat belt. Karen rapidly discovered why: Donald had meant that whirl literally. The seat could spin on all three axes. It could also give electric shocks and do a wide variety of other unpleasant things. Mrs. Donahue had to answer questions while the chair and some really horrible sound effects discombobulated her. Not surprisingly, she didn’t cover herself with glory.

“Too bad,” Donald said when her ordeal was over. “No all-expense-paid trip to the Moon for you, I’m afraid. But you do have the new refrigerator and five hundred dollars in cash, so this didn’t turn out too bad after all.”

“You’d better believe it!” Mrs. Donahue said gamely, and the audience gave her a big hand.

Later on, a young man did win a trip to the Moon, and just about passed out from excitement. Back on Earth, going to the Moon evidently still wasn’t something people did every day. Here from the Tau Ceti system, it didn’t seem quite such a big deal. Karen glanced over at Sam Yeager. He’d been to the Moon. He’d had a photo on his wall to prove it. Karen never had. If you lived in Southern California, going to Home and not the Moon was like going to Madagascar without ever visiting Long Beach.

At the end of the show, Donald’s eye turrets followed the lovely Rita’s . . . visible assets as if he were a human male with some special girl-watching equipment. Then one of them swiveled back toward the camera for a moment. “I know the real reason—reasons—you watch, you crazy people out there. You can’t fool me. We’ll see you tomorrow—and you’ll see us, too. So long.” The screen went dark.

“Pause,” Karen said in the Race’s language. For a wonder, the player listened to her twice running. She went back to English: “Do we really want to watch another episode right away?”

“If it’s got Rita in it, I’ll watch it,” Tom said. Linda planted a good, solid elbow in his ribs. He yelped, overacting—but he didn’t overact half as much as Donald did.

“Well,” Sam Yeager said, “it’s nice to know he’s making an honest living.”

“You call that honest?” Jonathan asked.

“He’s paying his own bills,” the older man answered. “If that’s the most popular game show in the country, he’s probably making money hand over fist. Of course, if that’s the most popular game show in the country, it’s probably a judgment on us all, but that’s a different story. But it’s not illegal, no matter what else you can say about it.”

“I think we’ve got the idea of what he does,” Frank Coffey said. “I wouldn’t mind leering at Rita some more—just don’t tell Kassquit about it—but it can wait. Rita’s a knockout, and Donald’s pretty damn funny, but the
show
. . . .” He shuddered and knocked back his drink. Then he walked out of the room. Karen wondered if he realized he was whistling the theme song from
You’d Better Believe It.